Today, exactly seven years have passed since The Pirate Bay was raided by the Swedish police. While the entertainment industries hoped that this would be the end of their troubles, in hindsight they’ve created one of the most resilient websites on the Internet. The Pirate Bay has declared the raid anniversary "Independence Day," alongside a determination to continue an ongoing battle worthy of a Hollywood blockbuster script.

The Pirate Bay has undergone some drastic changes over the years, moving from a fully-fledged BitTorrent tracker to a trimmed down torrent index.

First the tracker was removed, then the torrents followed and a few months ago the infamous torrent site canceled nearly all central servers as it moved to the cloud. In addition, the site switched domain names on multiple occasions.

All these changes were carried out to make the site more resilient and less likely to be shut down by the authorities. This determination to escape the long arm of justice was first brought to the forefront seven years ago.

Most of the site’s current users are probably unaware that without a few essential keystrokes in the site’s early years, The Pirate Bay may have not been here today.

May 31, 2006, less than three years after The Pirate Bay was founded, 65 Swedish police officers entered a datacenter in Stockholm. The policemen had instructions to shut down the largest threat to the entertainment industry at the time – The Pirate Bay’s servers.

While the police were about to raid the datacenter, Pirate Bay founders Gottfrid and Fredrik got wind that something was up. In the months before the raid they were already being watched by private investigators day and night, but this time something was about to happen to their trackers.

At around 10am in the morning Gottfrid told Fredrik that there were police officers at their office, and asked him to get down to the co-location facility and get rid of the ‘incriminating evidence’, although none of it, whatever it was, was related to The Pirate Bay.

As Fredrik was leaving, he suddenly realized that the problems might be linked to their tracker. He therefore decided to make a full backup of the site, just in case.

When he later arrived at the co-location facility the concerns turned out to be justified. There were dozens of policemen floating around taking away dozens of servers, most of which belonged to clients unrelated to The Pirate Bay.

Footage from The Pirate Bay raid

In the days that followed it became clear that Fredrik’s decision to start a backup of the site was probably the most pivotal moment in the site’s history. Because of this backup Fredrik and the rest of the Pirate Bay team managed to resurrect the site within three days.

The site’s operators were not impressed and renamed the site “The Police Bay” complete with a new logo shooting cannon balls at Hollywood. A few days later this logo was replaced by a Phoenix, a reference to the site rising from its digital ashes.

Logos after the raid

Instead of shutting it down the raid brought the site into the mainstream press, not least due to its amazing three-day resurrection. All this publicity resulted in a huge traffic spike for TPB, exactly the opposite effect Hollywood had hoped for.

Despite a criminal investigation leading to convictions for the site’s founders, The Pirate Bay kept growing and growing in the years that followed. The site’s assets, meanwhile, had been transferred to the Seychelles-based company Reservella.

Under new ownership two major technical changes occurred. In the fall of 2009 the infamous BitTorrent tracker was taken offline, turning The Pirate Bay into a torrent indexing site.

Early 2012 The Pirate Bay went even further when it decided to cease offering torrent files for well-seeded content. The site’s operators moved to magnet links instead, allowing them to save resources while making it easier for third-party sites to run proxies.

These proxies turned out to be much-needed, as The Pirate Bay is now the most broadly censored website on the Internet. In recent years ISPs in Denmark, Italy, UK, the Netherlands and elsewhere have been ordered by courts to block subscriber access to the BitTorrent site.

Late last year The Pirate Bay made another important change to its infrastructure by switching their entire operation to the cloud. Serving its users from several cloud hosting providers scattered around the world saves costs, guarantees better uptime, and makes the site more portable and thus harder to take down.

Finally, fearing a domain seizure by the Swedish authorities, TPB took action again last month. After hearing the rumors The Pirate Bay quickly switched to a Greenland-based domain, later hopping to Iceland, and eventually landing .SX domains as other problems became apparent.

And so The Pirate Bay lives on, closing on its tenth anniversary later this year and celebrating the raid anniversary which it previously declared as “Independence Day.”

“Our message is as it’s always been: We decide if the site dies or not, no one else. So today, 7 years after the raid, we celebrate our independence once again. Thank you for being a part of all this!,” Pirate Bay’s Winston writes today.

If there hadn’t been a recent backup, things may have turned out quite differently.